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Student Satirist Gets 3 Months; the Judge, Likely More
ponraul writes "When Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., 58, sentenced Hillary Transue, 17, on a harassment charge stemming from a MySpace parody of her high school's assistant principal, Hillary expected to be let off with a stern lecture; instead, the Wilkes-Barre, PA area teen got three months in a commercially operated juvenile detention center. In a reversal of fortune, Ciavarella and his colleague, Judge Conahan, 56, find themselves trying to plea-bargain an 87-month sentence in Federal correctional facilities relating to a kick-back scheme that netted the pair $2.6 Million and PA Child Care 5000 inmates." True poetic justice would be for these corrupt, callous judges to serve their sentences in the same kind of environment to which they were happy to dispatch juvenile defendants.
Then check this out: http://www.againstpuryear.org/
I will preface this by saying I don't know what charge they "convicted" the teenager of.
1) Isn't satire completely protected under the first amendment, ESPECIALLY if it is explicitly stated that it is satire? The page she created had a disclaimer on it.
2) The assistant principal is a public figure, and thus, under Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, can't even sue for emotional distress, let alone have someone convicted of a criminal offense.
The sentence needs to be immediately overturned, the record expunged, and the family should have the right to sue at least the judge, if not the state.
Don't buy it. You can't really "satire" your high school principle; they're unlikely to meet the "public figure" criteria that would protect the person who is making fun of them from legal repercussions if anything strayed over the line.
That being said, the sentence in this case was wildly inappropriate. The page could never have been mistaken for real libel due to the inclusion of text explicitly stating that the page is a joke. On top of that, jail time? For a juvenile?
Amusingly, it's high profile, geek-enraging cases like this that probably got him caught. If he'd kept sending kids to juvy for misdemeanors, it wouldn't have been covered so widely, and we wouldn't have given a damn.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
No, but it would act as an actual deterrent to future judges that might get similar ideas. The problem with capital punishment is that it is applied incorrectly to act as a deterrent. If someone thinks that the world would be better off without someone in it, one might think that it would be worth one's own life to rid the world of such a person. I doubt that many people would think that it would be worth risking their own lives to receive a kickback. Public officials need to be held to a higher standard. While I don't normally believe that the death penalty is effective, perhaps it should be used for public officials who abuse their authority.